DOI: 10.12870/iar-11755 156 WHAT DOES NOT KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER. LEGAL EVOLUTIONISM AND THE UNUSUAL CASE OF GOOGLE NEWS Massimiliano Granieri 1,2 Keywords: Google News, Copyright, Snippets, Neighboring rights, Legal change Abstract: Google News is an unusual case where the dominant firm of the market for searches allegedly abuses its position by using news which publishers consider as subject to their copyright. Publishers claim that there is an antitrust violation and Google’s service diverts users on its sites, reducing traffic for competitors. All such allegations hinge on the issue of snippets as really works of authorship, as such protected. Several interpretations of copyright laws are possible to provide an answer. Some states have responded by enacting new legislation and introducing neighboring rights on fragments of news, thus preventing Google from freely using headlines and excerpts for it purposes. Where protection was reinforced, Google’s reaction was to discontinue the service, while in other situations it entered into private arrangements with online publishers, thus confirming that in an evolutionary perspective copyright laws only set the stage for efficient solutions that are found by market players in the shadow of the law. 1 Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Brescia Health & Wealth. 2 Article based on the speech given at the conference: “Diritti e benessere del consumatore nell’ecosistema digitale”, Rome, 14 May 2015. 1. AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ABOUT GOOGLE NEWS The Google News case offers an enticing perspective for scholars interested in investigating the reasons that explain legal change. The case adds to the history of copyright and to the relationship between technological progress and regulatory responses, concurring to a possible reconstruction of how legal systems adapted over time 3 . This short papers supports the view that evolutionism applied to law provides a convincing paradigm to describe (and possibly predict) the interaction of intellectual property protection, spontaneous private ordering and state intervention. Apparently, the topic only bears a feeble link to consumers’ welfare but as a matter of fact Google News is mostly about the benefits that consumers receive by access to information and to the effects related to the prohibition for Google to offer such service. Any regulatory solution about content aggregation should 3 One of the most rich and problematic reconstructions of this history (from an economic and technological perspective) is still A. JOHNS, The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, The University of Chicago Press, 2009.